YouTube values the absence of their ads at $12/mo.

If I make $1/mo/per user from adverts, but my conversion rate is 1/12 at $12/mo, then I'm making $23 for every 12 users.

Doesn't mean I make $12/user/month.

People who are willing to pay to remove ads are usually the more valuable eyes.

Few years ago we discussed these numbers on a pretty popular (top 5 of its kind) local pic-and-discussion forum. Devs said that an average user brings around $2 in a year (including those using adblock, etc). I sent them around $8 and they turned off any ads for my account forever. I could just continue using ad blocking, but they made that “hey you’re using” header that annoyed me on mobile, where it is hard to “pick an element”. Of course their income/user ratio is not comparable to youtube’s one, but they meet their ends well, and also have much much lower megabytes/user ratio. In infra costs they may be even more profitable per user than youtube (just a blind guess).

Only difference is that we've learned that third-party ad placements are much lower quality and barely worth the ad spend. YouTube ads are highly valuable since they're effectively first-party and will offer high(er) assurances of whether clicks are legitimate. And, as mentioned below, people willing to pay for YT Premium are probably more valuable than the average viewer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858

Average income per user is (say) $10/year.

80% of population is worth $5 and 20% is worth $30 ; but all of the YT premium subscriber are from the 20%, so despite the average only being $10, offering it for less than $30 will lose money.

Facebook doesn’t make $12 per user per month last time I checked. They have about 80b revenue from 2.5 billion users.

Maybe in the US they might get that per user, but not worldwide.